Tim Cook’s interview on CNBC last night highlighted the huge gulf between his optimistic view of Apple’s future prospects, and the pessimistic one being expressed in both Wall Street commentary and the share price.

The share price speaks for itself. As Business Insider notes, the stock has dropped 11% since Apple announced its first-quarter earnings, and 27% over the past year. Even billionaire investor Carl Icahn – who once couldn’t stop talking about how under-valued AAPL was – sold 7M shares back in February and has now dumped the stock altogether. Not the greatest expression of confidence in the company’s future.

Analysts have been queuing up to pronounce that Apple is doomed, the iPhone is on a slide, it’s all over. Tim Cook, meanwhile, claims that Wall Street is guilty of ‘hugely over-reacting’ to a short-term glitch …

Tim Cook and company lead Apple’s annual shareholders meeting of 2016 this morning, and as usual there were some interesting questions and answers between those in attendance. Like last year, Apple’s rumored electric vehicle project came up, only the Apple CEO didn’t automatically defer to CarPlay this go around. Diversity and Apple’s ongoing battle with the FBI over encryption were also topics of discussion at the Cupertino meeting at Apple HQ.

Apple is set to release its FY16 Q1 report tomorrow, and today Fortune has released their results of an analyst survey conducted ahead of Apple’s upcoming announcements. Fortune indicates that Apple may actually report the “most profitable quarter in the history of capitalism”, but investors are more concerned with the iPhone’s trajectory numbers as to indicate what may happen in the coming quarter.

So what are our analysts expecting this week? No surprises, that’s for sure. The average revenue estimate of the 37 analysts we’ve heard from so far — 14 amateurs and 23 pros — is 43.5 billion, just above the midpoint of Oppenheimer’s range.

The amateurs, as usual, are a bit more bullish. They’re calling for earnings of $10.53 per share on sales of $43.66 billion. The pros are not far behind: earnings of $10.18 on sales of $43.42 billion …

Just off the wires, Apple is more than doubling its capital returns citing its inability to stop making more money than it can spend to “operate the business, invest in our future, and maintain flexibility to take advantage of strategic opportunities.”

As part of this program, Apple’s board has increased its share repurchase authorization to $60 billion from the $10 billion level announced last year. This is the largest single share repurchase authorization in history and is expected to be executed by the end of calendar 2015. Apple also expects to utilize about $1 billion annually to net-share-settle vesting restricted stock units.

Market tracker IDC says Apple’s Q1 Mac shipments in the US fell 7.5 percent year-on-year, while rival company Gartner says they increased 7.4 percent in the same period. Meantime, the NPD Group – which measures sales rather than shipments – says those are up 14 percent … expand full story